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• Photography was invented twice: initially during a period of concealed technological development up to 1839, and again in the following decades, reinvented by social uses and cultural dialogue.
• The invention of photography-or photographies, different image-making methods-did not stem from a visual tradition or social need, but from a favorable climate toward progress, research, and innovation.
• Around 1800, Western European governments started promoting economic growth through industry and commerce, viewing social progress as arising from intellectual freedom in solving scientific problems.
• The educated classes, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and enlightened landlords who constituted the growing middle class, and the petite bourgeoisie benefited most from this progress.
• Photographic process elements came together in an era when national policy and values encouraged practical applications of experiments.
• Independent entrepreneurs began to believe in the rewards of research investments.
• Early photography experiments show cultural attitudes prompting resourcefulness to solve problems.
• While not all inventors sought financial gain, they did believe in tinkering with devices and formulas.
• In 1839, the industrializing world explored photography for portraiture, record-keeping, political persuasion, academic investigation, and travel accounts.
• Ten years later, photographic subjects and applications rapidly evolved due to inclinations and societal needs.
• Portrait market expanded, historical events were captured, science embraced the medium, and artists explored personal expression.

Origins of Photography (to 1839)

• Devices have been employed since ancient times to aid recreating optical reality.
• Photography was invented independently by people in a short period during the Industrial Revolution, sparking discoveries and social discourse.
• Photography was presented on August 19, 1839, in Paris at a joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts.
• Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) was named inventor, but François Arago (1786-1853) gave the presentation. Dagurre received a pension.
• Daguerre revealed his method in Historique et description du procédé du Daguerréotype et du Diorama (1839).
• Tradition casts Daguerre as the originator of photography due to François Arago. Development involves missed opportunities.
• Basic ingredients of photography include a light-tight box, lenses, and light-sensitive substances known for hundreds of years.
• The dark interiors of churches in Florence and Paris were punctured with a small hole in the roof, which worked like a lens to focus an image of the sun on the floor below.
• The sun's movements measured and used to establish the modern calendar.
• The cathedral served as a camera.
• Silver darkens when exposed to light.
• Before the end of the eighteenth century, imagining the photographic process may have presented difficulties.
• American essayist and medical doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) remarked that there was no prediction of such an inconceivable wonder.
• In utopian and speculative fiction written prior to 1800, only the 1760 novel Giphantie, by French writer Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche (1723-1774), anticipated something like the detailed transcription of the observable world that would occur with photography.
• The narrator visits the hollow of the earth's center where a group of spirits smear a mysterious viscous material like a mirror.
• The canvas records color and detail and it becomes permanent.
• Giphantie anticipated the use of light-sensitive chemicals, but the story did not involve a light-tight box, or lenses etc.
• Connection to the technical, social is not easy to establish. Expanding commerence etc.
• Historian Eric Hobsbawm persuasively depicted a world that was largely rural. Even in Britain, industrialism was advanced.
• Novels describing the Industrial Revolution did not appear until the 1830s and 1840s.
• The visual arts were dominated by Neoclassical.
• Photographer John Constable (1776-1837) light effects.
• Photographer Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) fantastical.
• French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) expressionistic color.
• Barbizon School art. Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), photography had been invented by several people.
• Visual depictions copied to communicate visual information in uninflected manner.
• Artists drew on wooden or metal plate and were expected faithfully to copy historic monuments, even works of art.
• French printmaker Abraham Bosse (1602-1676) wrote how to achieve greater fidelity by employing a screen with equally spaced squares.
• PANTOGRAPH helped artists copy, enlarge, or reduce drawings.
• French engraver Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1754-1811) adapted the pantograph in 1786, calling his invention the PHYSIONOTRACE.
• The physionotrace mechanized a technique for making profiles that can be traced back to the time of Louis XIV (1638-1715; г. 1643-1715).
• SILHOUETTES entertained and supported artistic venture. Usually single image.
• Acceptance of the silhouette and growth of the middle class in eighteenth-century Europe, influenced likenesses.
• Drawing aid with the most direct effect on photography was the CAMERA OBSCURA, or dark room.
• Darked room-size chamber has tiny opening focussed on opposite wall.
• William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) invented the lightweight CAMERA LUCIDA, or light room, consisted of a rod to which was affixed a glass prism with two silvered sides
• The user traced it directly
• Both techniques make multiple copies
• Some systems in 1800s created unique single images, others fashioned techniques that could make multiple copies.

The Invention of "Photographies"

• Made to fit into notion that invention is regular
• Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence (1804-1879) traveled to record in Brazil.
• He settled in Campinas, São Paulo, where he painted views and portraits.
• In 1830, he called poligraphie, meaning "multiple writing.'
• He studied Fabris and the camera obscura to study image persistence.
• He then made pictures of small cameras and used it to make diplomas.
• In 1832, he coined the term photographie for his process, from Greek words for light and writing.